Category Archives: News

The current Greenhaviour experiment is a proof point for a major innovation in terms of environmental monitoring. Networks of sensors and measurement stations already exist, but they are essentially fixed and their amount relatively limited.

The trip is over: after more than 3 months on the road facing the wilderness elements from the roof of the Viac challenge expedition orange car, we arrived to the planned destination: China. « The mission has been accomplished » as someone would say. We prefer to say : what a wonderful adventure, what a great way to use something we use everyday as twitter and a smartphone in a slightly different way.

Well, let us say we are really proud of this. If we made it is because of you who followed us via this blog and Twitter, to Edward, Bharat, Andrea, Marc, Alberto at IBM Italy, France, Uk, the people at the IBM Software Group Marketing Italy, Michael and everyone at Sensaris, the people at Overland with special thanks to Beppe, his son Filippo and our « agent » Andressa, and obviously to the outstanding team of the Viac with a special thanks to Pier Paolo and Isabella not to mention His Majesty Professor Broggi.

But to us this is just the beginning. Now is time to analyze data, perfomance, the (many) good things and the (few) bad ones. But before get in depth in the next days through the meaning of it all, we can start sharing with you some early points.

We can do it !

From a crazy idea in the hot Parma sourroundings at the end of may to Shanghai….well it is possible. And it worked. So the answer to our main question: « is it possible to monitor the enviroment using « on the shelf » devices » , is YES!

Internet of things? Delivered

The key aspect of the “Internet of Things” is to put computing power into things like cars, appliances, roads, power-grids, clothes – and why not people!? The Viac challenge is living proof that we can put intelligence into cars and the Greenhaviour project is the living proof that “intelligence” is a big word that contains different meanings. If we could apply the Greenhaviour project paradigm to a whole community we could anaylse the results in all sorts of different ways to truly visualise the environment that people live in. So, what do you are waiting for?

IPP+Twitter+Android, what else?

The IBM intelligent pervasive platform base on Websphere Application Server and DB2 we put back to the Android operating system and the Nexus 1 kept the promise: the system was super reliable, tough, efficient. This is not an ad, but we can be very good testimonials, trust us. And Twitter is the channel that put it all toghether.GPS: the B2C alternativeThe vehicles were equipped with a very sophisticated marine-origin GPS system. But our Android native one was there to prove is reliability and accuracy even compared with hi-tech stuffs. And it proved it’s utility to the expedition when needed.

Curious about the trip? A little foreword for your eyes only.A nice place where to spend your next holidays? Well, near L’viv in Ukraine: we spotted there the lowest co2 value all over Europe and Asia.

While if you want to really start coughing you can go to Novi Sad: the highest value from Rome to Shanghai.

How many records on such a trip? If you like numbers we measured more than 14,000 variations in Co2 value. What a sniffer!

So let me say welcome to Shanghai Greenhaviour and thanks you all that followed us up to here. Stay with us in the next day…more info and news to come, live from China.

The association of sensors with smartphones open an incredible wide range of new possibilities as the sensors move with those who use the smartphones, creating a perpetually moving network for monitoring. The limit is almost infinite: as many detectors as smartphones users equipped. For some purposes, every car could be enabled at a very limited cost. Possibilities are huge.
This is another way to build a smarter planet take advantage of every smartphone user to collect data, gather it into an analytical system and have an unprecedented understanding of what is going on in the world in the selected area: pollution or traffic just for example. But also similar applications could be envisioned in the healthcare area, like personal monitoring of medical parameters : blood sugar levels for diabetic patients, oxygen saturation of patients with respiratory diseases, etc……

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A long journey from Italy to China begins today from Belgrade. We call it the Intercontinental Challenge, a challenge to see how the interactions between human beings and cars can contribute to save human lives and give information on our carbon footprint and environmental parameters. The vehicles travelling from Milan to Shanghai will in fact hosting CO2 sensors to increment their sensing capabilities and provide data on air pollution in real time.

Why this project? Every year 40.000 people die on European roads. VisLab, the spinoff company of the University of Parma lead, has been developing driver assistance systems that, once installed onboard of vehicle, will warn the driver or even take control of the vehicle in case of danger, ultimately improving road safety and reduce car accidents. Such systems need a thorough and long testing. With this intercontinental drive, VisLab aims at collecting a unique database of many different situations (traffic, infrastructure, weather, other road users’ behavior…) in order to test – and finally improve- their Driver Assistance Systems. About 100 terabytes of data will be acquired during 3 months and along a 13,000 km journey from Italy to China. Follow us on the road, from 20th July to 10th October.…

Today the the VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge (VIAC) has been launched officially in Milan, Piazza Duomo. Together with the Overland trucks they will make a 13,000 km journey to Shanghai in China using driverless solar energy powered vehicles. The project will not only showcase the benefits of green transport, but the automated vehicles will also use IBM Human Centric solutions to collect CO2 pollutants in regions through which the vehicles will pass. The sensors will be on the 22nd of July when the convoy will be in Rome….stay tuned!!!!

Protection of the atmosphere is an environmental issue that will affect policies as diverse as energy, transport and land development. Although emissions of key air pollutants have decreased in recent years, the economic costs of air and noise pollution for cities are still growing. In terms of human health, in its publication “Preventing disease through healthy environments – towards an estimate of the global burden of disease”, 2006, the World Health Organization indicates that 24% of global disease is due to the “modifiable” part of our environment. Currently, most environmental measurements are performed by a limited number of fixed sensors disseminated within urban areas. For example, there are only 2,300 stations reporting air quality to the European Environmental Agency. The cost of establishing and implementing ordinary monitoring systems is extremely high; use of analytical instruments are time-consuming, expensive, and can seldom be applied for real-time monitoring in the field, even though these can give a precise analysis . In Japan, NTT DoCoMo has started a project to put environmental sensors on their base stations to gather climate and air quality information. The sensor system has already been deployed at rowing machine reviews several hundred sites in Tokyo, with 2,500 sites set for deployment across the country within fiscal 2010 ending March 2011. Eventually, 9,000 sites will be deployed nationwide, but at over $ 9k per unit these systems are too expensive for worldwide dissemination. Bringing the vision of public involvement in environmental monitoring to a reality poses today substantial technical challenges for the ICT systems infrastructure, to scale up from isolated well controlled systems to an interoperable, Internet based scalable infrastructure where heterogeneous mobile and fixed sensors generate large amounts of data. The pioneering Greenhaviour project is leading the way for mobile environmental monitoring. Even though only CO2 information is broadcasted for the time being, the IBM team also simultaneously collects ambient noise level, CO, NOx, humidity and temperature information. To prepare for future data gathering in smart cities, Sensaris has also developed other products such as UV or ozone sensors and it started an R&D project to enable 3D mapping as well. As real time sensor data collection and transmission with smartphones become part of our “smarter planet”, there is no doubt that the next challenge will be to process and extract actionable information with infrastructures such as stream processing.

The trip is over: after more than 3 months on the road facing the wilderness elements from the roof of the Viac challenge expedition orange car, we arrived to the planned destination: China. « The mission has been accomplished » as someone would say. We prefer to say : what a wonderful adventure, what a great way to use something we use everyday as twitter and a smartphone in a slightly different way.

Well, let us say we are really proud of this. If we made it is because of you who followed us via this blog and Twitter, to Edward, Bharat, Andrea, Marc, Alberto at IBM Italy, France, Uk, the people at the IBM Software Group Marketing Italy, Michael and everyone at Sensaris, the people at Overland with special thanks to Beppe, his son Filippo and our « agent » Andressa, and obviously to the outstanding team of the Viac with a special thanks to Pier Paolo and Isabella not to mention His Majesty Professor Broggi.

But to us this is just the beginning. Now is time to analyze data, perfomance, the (many) good things and the (few) bad ones. But before get in depth in the next days through the meaning of it all, we can start sharing with you some early points.

We can do it !

From a crazy idea in the hot Parma sourroundings at the end of may to Shanghai….well it is possible. And it worked. So the answer to our main question: « is it possible to monitor the enviroment using « on the shelf » devices » , is YES!

Internet of things? Delivered

The key aspect of the “Internet of Things” is to put computing power into things like cars, appliances, roads, power-grids, clothes – and why not people!? The Viac challenge is living proof that we can put intelligence into cars and the Greenhaviour project is the living proof that “intelligence” is a big word that contains different meanings. If we could apply the Greenhaviour project paradigm to a whole community we could anaylse the results in all sorts of different ways to truly visualise the environment that people live in. So, what do you are waiting for?

IPP+Twitter+Android, what else?

The IBM intelligent pervasive platform base on Websphere Application Server and DB2 we put back to the Android operating system and the Nexus 1 kept the promise: the system was super reliable, tough, efficient. This is not an ad, but we can be very good testimonials, trust us. And Twitter is the channel that put it all toghether.GPS: the B2C alternativeThe vehicles were equipped with a very sophisticated marine-origin GPS system. But our Android native one was there to prove is reliability and accuracy even compared with hi-tech stuffs. And it proved it’s utility to the expedition when needed.

Curious about the trip? A little foreword for your eyes only.A nice place where to spend your next holidays? Well, near L’viv in Ukraine: we spotted there the lowest co2 value all over Europe and Asia.

While if you want to really start coughing you can go to Novi Sad: the highest value from Rome to Shanghai.

How many records on such a trip? If you like numbers we measured more than 14,000 variations in Co2 value. What a sniffer!

So let me say welcome to Shanghai Greenhaviour and thanks you all that followed us up to here. Stay with us in the next day…more info and news to come, live from China.